Fifteen WVU engineering
students attended the competition with the 260-pound steel bridge they designed
and built over the past eight months.

“This year we made many modifications to reduce the weight
and assembly time of our bridge during the competition,” said Lee Shields, a civil engineering major from Punxsutawney,
Pennsylvania, and the steel bridge team co-captain. “We changed the leg design
of the bridge and reduced the amount of bolts we had to fasten from more than
70 last year to just 28, which drastically increased our assembly speed.”

Following a strict set of standards and guidelines set by ASCE,
the bridge design had to be able to withstand 2,500 pounds of weight. The
pieces of the bridge were all three feet or smaller in length and constructed
with slide connections for increased speed. The team was able to assemble their
bridge in just 12.5 minutes, 16 minutes faster than the second-place team.

“We are extremely proud to have won the regional conference,”
said Shields. “We spent four months just refining our design before we began
assembling our bridge and every single member of the team played a key role in
our success. We could not be more excited to see our hard work and dedication
rewarded.”

The teams’ first-place finish will move them onto the
national competition at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, Oregon,
scheduled for May 26-27. More than 50 teams from across the nation are expected
to attend.

“Our back-to-back wins will motivate us more than ever as we
prepare to head to the national competition,” said Shields. “Our goal this year
is to place among the top 20 teams and keep working our way up the national
scale.”

Over the next month, the team will continue making
improvements to their bridge and begin fundraising for the trip.

“We are hopeful that through our fundraising efforts we will
be able to send every member of our team to Oregon,” said Shields. “We still
have a lot of work to do, but we cannot wait to represent WVU on a national
scale.”

In addition to winning the steel bridge competition, WVU placed
first in the transportation competition; second in the hardy cross
presentation, sand castle building and concrete bowling competition; and fourth
in the concrete canoe competition.

-WVU-

bmf/04/03/17

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-WVU-

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